Police set up cybercrime training center in Linz

2023-08-08 12:07:00

The training program is scheduled to start in spring 2024 and is open to police officers and officers of the interior department in the criminal police service. Public prosecutors will also use the training center. The aim is to set up a CCTC in every state criminal police office.

“The most urgent goal of the criminal service reform is to set up the police in a modern and up-to-date manner in order to be powerful and successful in the fight against cybercrime,” said Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) at the presentation of the new training concept on Tuesday in Linz with LH deputy Christine Haberlander (ÖVP), State Police Director Andreas Pilsl and Chief Public Prosecutor Harald Winkler.

Increasing number of crimes

In the field of cyber crime, the number of cases has tripled in the past seven years, “that’s why we want to protect the Upper Austria location in cooperation with security forces and science with all consistency, also in the long term,” said Haberlander. “In the first half of this year, the number of cases of fraud committed on the Internet increased by 30 percent compared to the same period last year,” emphasized the Minister of the Interior at a press conference in Vienna on Monday. 17,500 of these cyber crimes have already been reported in the first six months of this year. “That’s around 100 cases of fraud on the Internet every day,” says Karner.

A practical “hands-on” training concept with small groups of up to ten participants and experience-oriented learning is to be implemented in the CCTC. In addition to experts from the state police headquarters and the Federal Criminal Police Office, external speakers, IT experts, cybercrime investigators and IT forensic scientists will train with the establishment of the CCTC. The Federal Criminal Police Office takes on the Austria-wide coordination of the teaching content. The aim is to work together with the HTL Leonding, where there is a special focus on “IT security”, the new ‘Institute of Digital Sciences Austria’, the JKU and the universities of applied sciences.